Woods is presented with his winner's jacket by Nick Faldo. Photograph: Dave Martin/AP

The second installment of our series of classic reports was published on April 7 1997. Six days later Tiger Woods would become the youngest man in history to win the Masters, and he'd do it by a record 12 clear strokes. In this article Greg Williams asks whether the world is ready to meet Tiger Woods

Next week America will officially remember an infamous footnote in its history. Tuesday marks the fiftieth anniversary of Jackie Roosevelt Robinson trotting out for the Brooklyn Dodgers to become the first black man to play in League baseball since an unofficial colour bar had been implemented in 1895. Sadly, it's not an exceptional anniversary in American sporting history only 10 years before, Joe Louis had become the first black man allowed to fight for the world heavyweight crown for 42 years.

As baseball fans happily settle down for another season, content in the knowledge that many of their sport's biggest stars are black or Hispanic, they will notice that all players will wear a small patch on their shirts bearing the commemorative message 'Breaking Barriers'.

Robinson died in 1972, and his headstone bears this epitaph: "A life is not important except in the impact it has on other people's lives".

Tiger Woods, as he prepares to tee off in the Masters at Augusta, Georgia next Thursday, in the heartland of redneck America, would do well to heed these words. Not just because his is the most anticipated and extraordinary entrance into the world of professional golf since Jack Nicklaus's, but also because he is a young, black man who has achieved phenomenal success in a sport that has traditionally been the preserve of middle-aged, middle-class, white, corporate America.

Remember, we're taking about a sport that is run by people who, until 1990, were quite happy to sanction events at places that excluded Afro-Americans. And this is why Tiger may be just what golf needs. Tiger Woods, you see, isn't simply a golfer. He's a phenomenon, a marketing professional's dream. He has recently signed contracts worth a total of $60 million with Nike and the golf-club manufacturer Titleist. Talented and good-looking, he's a colt in a world of seasoned war horses, with just the right level of attitude to make him saleable. His name alone is a merchandiser's fantasy.

His real name is somewhat less fearsome. Eldrick doesn't sound quite the same as Tiger, which is the nickname given to him by his father, Earl Woods, a retired Green Beret Lieutenant-Colonel, who served two tours of duty in Vietnam. The story goes that Tiger was the nickname of a South Vietnamese soldier, Nguyen Phong, who saved Earl's life during the war.

And it was in Vietnam that Earl met a Thai girl, Kultida Punsawad, whom he married in 1969. Their son Eldrick was born in December 1975 in Long Beach, California. Fast forward 22 years to Tiger's arrival in Thailand last February for the Asian Honda Classic. Tiger Mania, as the Thai press dubbed it, swept across the nation and the media coverage saturated the country as thoroughly as any south-east Asian monsoon. Tiger was even granted a meeting with the Thai Prime Minister who, rumour had it, wanted to offer Woods honorary Thai citizenship.

Americans will tell you that Tiger's 'ethnicity' is an important part of what makes him such a powerful totem. Describing himself as Asian Afro-American, he is actually a mixture of African, Thai, Chinese, American-Indian and European, which pretty much encompasses the entire racial make-up of the US. This should ensure a sizeable core readership for any one of the six Tiger biographies that are now being written.

Look into Woods' upbringing and you will find much of what makes him the man he is today: his determination is drawn from a childhood during which it was always expected that he would succeed as a professional golfer.

Returning from the war, Earl Woods purchased a house next to a golf course. By the age of 10 months, Tiger was hitting practice shots in the family garage. When he was three, he was outputting Bob Hope on national television and being coached in public relations by his father. With a family able to stump up competition costs of around $20,000 per year, Tiger spent his teens in amateur competition, winning three US Junior Amateurs, thereby repaying his father's faith and encouragement. It would be fair to say that Earl Woods had high hopes for his son.

In a recent interview with the American magazine Sports Illustrated, he claimed that "Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity". When pressed on this point "more than Nelson Mandela? More than Gandhi?" Mr Woods continued:

"Yes, because he has a larger forum than any of them. Because he's playing a sport that's international. Because he's qualified through his ethnicity to accomplish miracles. He's the bridge between East and West. He is the Chosen One. He will have the power to impact nations. The world is just getting a taste of his power."

His mother concurs. "He can hold everyone together,"she says. "He is the Universal Child." Woods who shares some of his mother's Buddhist faith (every year on his birthday he travels with her to a temple where he makes a gift of rice, sugar and salt to the monks) claims that these expectations are not a burden on him: "I see it as fortunate," he has said. "I've always known where I wanted to go in life. I've never let anything deter me. This is my purpose. It will unfold." However, doing little but play golf for most of his life has brought its own pressures, and questions are now being asked as to whether Tiger is well equipped to deal with the situation in which he now finds himself. Last autumn, he was criticised for failing to attend an awards dinner held in his honour, on the grounds that he was "tired" ("I can't remember being tired when I was 20," the old American pro Tom Kite commented).

Increasingly, there are reports of him becoming irritable and frustrated while playing. Similarly he reacts angrily to the portrayal of his father as a controlling Svengali basking in the reflected glory of his son's success.

Meanwhile, golf experts scratch their heads in wonder while trying to deconstruct Woods's swing, and thereby discover the secret of his extraordinarily powerful driving, which is longer even than that of noted huge hitters such as Greg Norman and John Daly.

People who know about golf will tell you that there is no weak aspect to his game. He is steady, competitive, balanced and controlled. Woods announced his arrival on the professional circuit last August, at the Greater Milwaukee Open, with a drive that took the ball 336 yards down the fairway. It was enough to quieten the doubters who questioned whether the success he had achieved as an amateur player he won the American Amateur Championship an unprecedented three times in a row could continue in the rarefied atmosphere of the professional circuit.

If the truth be told, there was nowhere left for Woods to go as an amateur, so last year he quit his economic studies at Stanford where he had been studying on a golf scholarship to play full-time. Since then he has had an enormously encouraging start on the US tour, compounding his reputation as a dynamic, attacking player who thrives on confrontation. At Augusta, he faces his greatest challenge yet aged 2, Woods is being tipped to win the US Masters, the year's first golfing major. If he succeeds it will be a quite staggering achievement in a sport in which players usually reach their peak during their thirties and forties. Middle-age is a long way off for Woods but, if he wanted to, he could retire now. Money is no longer an issue for him, although some in the game wonder whether this might reduce his desire to win. Nike's investment in a 21-year-old playing a sport that has little of the glamour of basketball, soccer, tennis or athletics might seem a little risky.

But Nike likes to play strictly by its own rules and is aware that golf is one of the few truly global sports. Hence, along with other Nike-endorsed athletes, such as baseball's Ken Griffey Jr and sprinter Michael Johnson, Tiger is a pretender to the throne still occupied by the ageing but still sprightly basketball legend Michael Jordan, the highest earner in US sport. The boom in sports television over the past 15 years has boosted the earnings of successful contemporary athletes ever skywards and the sign of the swoosh can continue to push Woods into an earnings league not dreamed of by Jackie Robinson.

Woods is now part of an industry that has become as important as music as a vehicle for mass communication. It's arguable that sport is the most potent marketing device of our times and Nike, perhaps more than any other, is the company that has grasped and capitalised on this most fully. Its ad campaigns have placed Woods very carefully as an outsider intent on kicking over the bastions of rich, white, corporate America and nowhere could possibly be richer, whiter and more corporate than America's golf clubs.

Witness the Woods Nike ad that ran on American television last year: Woods faces the camera and lists his remarkable achievements before stating:

"Hello world. There are still courses in the United States that I am not allowed to play because of the colour of my skin. Hello world. I've heard that I'm not ready for you. Are you ready for me?"

The message is simple Nike is the brand that challenges the established rules and Tiger Woods is the vessel through which they have chosen to convey the message. In Tiger Woods: The Making of a Champion by Tim Rosaforte, Michael Jordan is quoted as saying, "I admire Tiger for what he's done thus far because for so long it was truly a game that a lot of minorities couldn't play. . . so in that sense he's carrying an extra burden with him, to succeed and expand across all racial barriers."

Whether Tiger Woods will change the world in the way that his father believes he can, in the way that Muhammad Ali did, is unlikely, but then Tiger has other things on his mind, ambitions that transcend issues of race. Tiger Woods doesn't simply want to be the best black golfer of all time, he wants to be the best golfer of all time. He may just do it.

Last week, eleven years on from this article, The Observer's Kevin Mitchell asked 'What's become of Tiger's legacy?', his article makes an interesting counter-point to this piece. To read it,click here.

To watch a three-year-old Tiger Woods on TV with Bob Hope,click here.To see the famous Nike 'Hi world' commercial click here.